Re: my thoughts about grub 2

Imagine you've got 3 OSs: Hiaku, FreeDOS and ReactOS. Given that none
of these OSs normally have an "/etc" directory, which "/etc" should be
used to store GRUB's configuration?

I agree with you -- using GRUB2 in a multi-OS configuration is inherently
problematic due to the split-brain phenomenon, but if you're managing 3 OSes,
we expect you to be smart enough to work around the problem yourself. Keep in
mind that a multi-UNIX environment is not the target use case for GRUB2 --
it's one distro that manages the GRUB2 configuration. It would be a nightmare
to try to support three UNIXes, each with potentially different versions of
GRUB2, each trying to own the menu.

I know GRUB2 isn't the easiest thing to work with, but it's far more flexible
than Legacy GRUB was.

Also, no one's forcing you to use the autogenerated configuration file. You
can disable that and manually manage your menus, but in doing that you need to
understand that you're cutting out one of the more useful features.